Thank you for joining us for our virtual THRIVE! 2026 conference! It was a pleasure having you with us, and we hope you enjoyed the sessions, conversations, and opportunities to connect and learn.

If you missed a session—or would simply like to revisit your favorite moments—recordings from the conference are available on your PARWCC Learning Center. You’ll have access to the recordings for the next 90 days, so there’s plenty of time to catch up and review the content at your convenience.

We’d also love to hear about your experience. Please take a few minutes to complete our survey. Your feedback is incredibly valuable and helps us continue improving our events and creating a better experience for all our members.

Thank you once again for being part of the conference and contributing to its success. We truly appreciate your participation and look forward to welcoming you to another event soon!

Warm regards,

The PARWCC Leadership Team

I have been thinking lately about the difference between doing a job well and belonging to a profession. The distinction is probably less obvious than we sometimes make it sound. Plenty of people build successful businesses around a particular skill, develop real expertise, serve clients well, and earn a living without ever thinking much about what makes their work part of a larger profession. At some point, though, a field begins to ask questions that extend beyond the individual practitioner. What should someone doing this work actually know? What standards should exist? What responsibility comes with advising another person? How do we decide what competent work looks like when no licensing board or regulatory body makes that decision for us?

Resume writing and career coaching are interesting examples because the barriers to entry are so low. Someone can decide today that they are a resume writer or career coach and begin marketing those services tomorrow. There is no state license to obtain, no examination required before accepting a client, and no single authority determining whether someone has earned the right to use the title. In some ways, I think that openness has helped the profession. Many excellent writers and coaches came into this work through recruiting, human resources, education, leadership, communications, and other careers that gave them a perspective they may never have developed through one prescribed route. The other side of that openness, however, is that the profession has to take greater responsibility for establishing its own expectations.

That is one of the reasons I believe certification has value. The letters after our names are the most visible part of earning a credential, but I have never thought they were the most important part. What matters more is the process that comes before them. Certification asks us to compare our work with standards we did not create for ourselves. It asks us to study, submit our work for evaluation, and accept the possibility that something we have been doing for years may not be as strong as we believed it was. For people who spend much of their careers working independently, that outside evaluation can be particularly valuable because experience has a way of reinforcing both our strengths and our habits.

There is an understandable confidence that develops when you have done something successfully for a long time. You learn what works. You develop instincts. You begin recognizing patterns before a client finishes explaining the problem. All of that is part of becoming good at the work, but experience can also make it easier to stop questioning certain decisions. Certification introduces another set of eyes and another set of standards. It forces us to explain why we structure a resume a certain way, why we emphasize one accomplishment over another, or why we recommend a particular career strategy. There is a difference between knowing from experience that something tends to work and understanding the professional reasoning behind why it works.

I also think certification contributes to something larger than the development of any one writer or coach. Professions need some degree of shared language, common expectations, ethical standards, and continuing education if they are going to mature. That has become even more important as our work changes. Artificial intelligence is altering how resumes are written and how clients approach the process. Recruiting technology continues to evolve. Hiring practices shift, job categories change, and advice that may have made perfect sense several years ago can become outdated faster than we would like to admit. A certification earned at one point in a career cannot permanently establish expertise, nor should we expect it to. What it can do is reinforce the idea that professional competency is something we continue working on rather than something we complete.

None of this means that a credential guarantees excellent work. It does not. I have met extremely capable professionals who hold multiple certifications, and I have met extremely capable professionals who hold none. Credentials cannot replace judgment, curiosity, ethics, or the ability to understand the person sitting across from you. What certification does provide is a willingness to have our work measured against something other than our own opinion of it, and I think there is real value in that, particularly in a profession where clients often have very little way of evaluating our expertise before trusting us.

Perhaps that is part of what separates a service from a profession. It is not simply that people are willing to pay us to do the work. It is that, over time, the people doing the work decide it deserves standards, scrutiny, education, and a responsibility to keep getting better at it.

If there is one thing I have learned about this profession, it is this:  We never sit still.  

Fundamentals Director John Suarez has been sharing his thoughts about the evolution of your profession in his recent Insights meetings. The job market changes. Technology changes. Client expectations change. And just when we think we have figured something out, somebody invents a new acronym!

Which is exactly why I am so excited about what is happening at PARWCC – and especially about our upcoming Thrive! 2026 Virtual Conference. 

Thrive: Because it’s important we rise and THRIVE!

Thrive isn’t intended to be another conference where you sit in front of your computer, listen to a speaker for an hour, download a handout and then promptly forget where you saved it.

We’ve all done that. 

Instead, even though Thrive is virtual, we want this to be an opportunity to learn, connect, hopefully enjoy some laughs, and leave with something useful, no matter what YOUR practice looks like. 

But there’s another reason I’m excited about Thrive. Our people.  

One of the best things about PARWCC has always been the people who make up this organization. We have an incredible range of experience, specialties, backgrounds and perspectives represented in our membership.

And sometimes the person who can help you solve a problem isn’t the person standing at the front of the virtual room.

It’s the person sitting in the virtual room with you.

That’s the magic of an association. There’s still time to register!

And Thrive Is Only the Beginning

We have a lot happening at PARWCC beyond Thrive.

Our programming continues to evolve around the three areas at the heart of our new Institute model: Interviewing, Coaching, and Writing.

We’re also expanding opportunities to explore digital career strategy, coaching, interviewing, technology, business development and the many other issues affecting career professionals today.

We’re looking at what our members need now – and maybe even tomorrow – not what they needed five years ago.

Because let’s be honest: five years ago, none of us had quite the same conversations about AI that we’re having today!

It isn’t the time to wring our hands and proclaim the sky is falling. It’s time to do what you’ve always done – learn about the trends, determine what your practice needs, and magnify your value as a human with expertise, skill and importantly . . . judgement. 

Are You Getting Everything Out of Your Membership?

This is where I am going to put on my Executive Director hat for just a minute. I’m a consumer too! My Mom was raised during the Depression and I had a lot of lessons about “value” as I was growing up and some of those I bring with me to PARWCC.  

Are you using your PARWCC membership resources?

Because you have access to a lot more than a credential and a nice logo!

Go check the calendar and see if you want to register for upcoming live events. Live events don’t work for you? Check the Video Library.

IMPORTANTLY – have you updated your member profile? Your profile can be an important way for potential clients to learn more about you and your business. Job seekers want to affirm a real person is the right person to work with as they navigate a complicated job search. Make it easier for them to find you!

Have you attended an Insights meeting?

Have you connected with another member?

Have you taken advantage of one of our educational programs?

And, most importantly, have you registered for Thrive?

If the answer to some of those questions is, “Um…no?”

I get it. You’re busy – no one in this industry isn’t hustling to help clients and improve your practice. But it’s worth it to go poke around parwcc.com. Your membership is an investment. I want you to use it.

We Are Better Together  (I didn’t say this first, but I do say it a lot!)

Running a career services business can be wonderfully rewarding.

It can also be isolating.

Many of us work independently – even if you are part of a team. And sometimes we need someone who understands exactly what we’re talking about when we say, “My client wants to put 47 skills on the first page of the résumé.”  

That’s where community matters.

PARWCC gives you a place to find people who understand the work—not just the résumé, not just the coaching, not just the interview, but the profession that is behind it all. That is what I want PARWCC to continue to be: a place where you can learn something new, find your people, get a little inspiration, and occasionally say, “Oh good. It’s not just me!”

Join us for the conference. Take a look at the programming coming up. Explore the resources that are already part of your membership.

And if you haven’t been taking full advantage of PARWCC, there’s no better time to start.

And I promise—we’re not going to make you memorize another acronym.

At least not this month.

See you at Thrive!

Margaret
Executive Director
PARWCC

“Deliver what you promise. Do not fabricate or conceal facts. Coach clients to present accurate, evidence-based achievements and explain risks of mis-representation.”

— PARWCC Code of Business Ethics

“About 93% of job seekers admit to embellishing or lying during the hiring process.”

– Forbes, April 2026

There are lies. 

Then, there are “white lies.” 

Then, there are résumés. 

I suspect you associate that cynical philosophy with uninformed job seekers or jaded hiring decision makers. However, I’ve seen the meaning of these words offered—and accepted—as good advice between professional résumé writers and career coaches. 

This article will explain how that situation could occur, where you will find evidence of its existence, who’s responsible when it does happen, and how to guard your own practice from its toxic influences.

Some professionals slide into this transgression for the very best of reasons: they are doing all they can to “help” their clients. Paradoxically, it’s our drive to produce the best possible résumé, cover letter, and LinkedIn profile to give our clients the best possible advantage in the interviews which lead us astray. The greater the challenges our clients bring us, the more we want to help. Perhaps a real life example will illustrate the potential pitfall.

A client seeks out a résumé writer. He says he had a continuous work history for a considerable time before he came into a large inheritance. He used that money to travel the world. But now it’s time to return to the workforce. The writer knows, and his client may suspect, that such a long break in employment may be a “red flag” to an employer. 

At this critical point, the writer may get too close to the guardrail. They should be thinking about which skills the client had demonstrated that could be useful in another career field or with another company. Instead, this question creeps to the fore: How can I “spin” this break in employment? And, seeking to reach out to the client, he begins to discuss this idea with her. And the client is impressed.

However, the thoughtful client will be impressed in the wrong way. She’s put off by the idea that she has to “sell herself,” that résumés are documents that stretch the truth. Beyond that, such a résumé sets her up to continue the deception in the interviews. No wonder she’s upset; the entire process is demeaning. And now the writer has just confirmed those repugnant thoughts. The relationship the writer wants to have with this client is undermined. And so is the client’s view of the writer and our entire industry.

That view—that résumés and people who write them—are somehow dishonest goes back a long way. Decades ago, the primary source of advertising, The Yellow Pages, placed résumé writers in the same category as “massage parlors” and “escort services.” Back then, they considered them “rackets” and wouldn’t accept ads for them, even if those high standards cost them profitable customers. Thanks to PARWCC’s efforts our industry is now accepted as fully professional. We want to do everything we can to continue that perception.

Keeping high standards starts with us. Specifically, it begins when we qualify potential clients. Each of us should be able to answer this question: “Which clients will we not accept because we know we cannot help them?” Set aside the obvious answers for the moment: We might not be able to help a person with a very specialized background about which we know too little. We might not be able to meet a client’s very tight deadline. So how do we proceed? We often refer such clients to colleagues who have the background or resources we lack.

To return to the issue at hand, let’s think a bit deeper. Perhaps the following questions should guide us: Does this person have unrealistic expectations? Has this job seeker been slacking off for years and so has no performance that would meet an employer’s needs? Does he or she lack the minimum qualifications for the job? You may want to offer some general advice (without charge) just so this applicant hasn’t been left completely empty handed. But these are not—and never can be—a professional résumé writer’s clients.

One category remains: the special circumstances client. Consider the example I wrote about above, someone with several years’ break in employment. In cases like this, honesty (never “spin”) is the only policy. You are a talented enough writer to anticipate this concern in the cover letter. Perhaps these thoughts would be useful (if it reflects the truth as to what the client has been doing during his break):

“My résumé shows some time away from the work-a-day world. That period allowed me to reflect upon my own professional development. Now that I’ve had time to polish my skills dealing with other cultures and reflecting on which contributions I could make that would be most valuable to companies like yours, I am refreshed and ready to put all my energy and talent at your disposal.”

Honesty is the underlying value here. From a purely practical standpoint, it’s the only policy that makes sense. The alternative requires you and your client to lie…and to remember which story you told to which person. Just because the past cannot be changed, doesn’t limit the future for you or your clients.

I want to close by offering some concrete suggestions to keep us all on the straight and narrow (and profitable) path. Please consider these criteria for your clients to use as they judge the résumés and cover letters you write. First, did you (inadvertently) give them too little or too much credit for their accomplishments? Second, did they think of another example that illustrates the transferable skills that appeal to employers? Third, does your choice of words, your portrayal of their philosophy (particularly in the cover letter), “sound” like them?

We sell our clients confidence to manage their careers. We do it well by working very hard to build and maintain their trust, one client, one referral, at a time. So, let us rededicate ourselves to that mission and our code of ethics by instinctively knowing what really helps our clients, our practices, and our industry.